I have an idea that has been brewing in the back of my mind for some time. What if Blender was to use the rib format as its native format? The material editor would become a shader editor, and all you would have to do to render, is render the saved file in another render. Maybe Blender could even integrate that too. What do you think?

I personally think this would be an amazing improvment to Blender. It would give excellent render to Blender, not to mention options for the larger animation studios. They could still have the power of the big renderers, but help support a great tool like Blender.